ICANN rejects porn domain info request

ICANN has turned down a request from porn trade group the Free Speech Coalition for more information about the .xxx top-level domain application, including a list of its pre-registrations.
The organization sent a letter (pdf) to the FSC’s director Diane Duke last week, saying that the materials it requested about ICM Registry and IFFOR, its sponsorship body, are confidential.
This would make the information exempt from ICANN’s Documentary Information Disclosure Policy.
The FSC had specifically requested:

1. The list of the IFFOR Board members;
2. The list of proposed members of the Policy Council;
3. IFFOR’s Business Plan/Financials;
4. Business Plan/Financials Years 1‐5 utilizing 125,000 Initial Registrations;
5. The list of .XXX sTLD pre-registrants who have been identified to ICANN; and
6. ICM’s Proof of Sponsorship Community Support as submitted to ICANN.

According to ICANN, ICM was asked if it would like to lift the confidentiality restrictions and ICM did not respond.
The FSC believes that many of .xxx’s 180,000+ pre-registrations are defensive in nature, made by pornographers who would really prefer that the TLD is never approved, which ICM disputes.

Will the internet get two new ccTLDs (and lose one)?

One country dropped off the map on Sunday, and two new countries were created. So does this mean we’re going to get two new country-code top-level domains?
The islands of Curacao and St. Maarten have reportedly become autonomous countries, after the dissolution of the Netherlands Antilles, a collection of former Dutch colonies off north-east coast of Venezuela.
The reorganization sees a number of other islands join the Netherlands as municipalities, while Curacao and St. Maarten become countries in the own right, albeit still tied politically tied to the motherland.
It seems quite possible that these two islands will now get their own ccTLDs, for two reasons.
First, both states are now reportedly as autonomous as fellow former Dutch Antilles territory Aruba, if not more so. Aruba acquired this status in 1986 and had .aw delegated to it by IANA in 1996.
Second, St Maarten shares a landmass with St Martin, a former French colony. The French northern side of the island is already entitled to its own ccTLD, .mf, although the domain has never been delegated.
ICANN/IANA does not make the call on what is and isn’t considered a nation for ccTLD purposes. Rather, it defers to the International Standards Organization, and a list of strings called ISO 3166-2.
The ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency in turn defers to the UN’s Statistics Division and its “Countries or areas, codes and abbreviations” list, which can be found here.
How long a new ccTLD delegation takes can vary wildly.
Montenegro, for example, declared its independence on June 3, 2006. It was added to the ISO 3166 list on September 26 that year, applied for a ccTLD on December 24, and received its delegation of .me following an ICANN board vote on September 11, 2007.
Finland’s Aland Islands got .ax less than six months after applying in 2006. North Korea, by contrast, received .kp on the same day as Montenegro got .me, but had first applied in 2004.
IANA treats the deletion of a ccTLD much more cautiously, due to the fact that some TLDs could have many second-level registrations already.
The removal of the former Yugoslavian domain, .yu, was subject to a three-year transition process under the supervision of the new .rs registry.
The Dutch Antilles has its own ccTLD, .an, which is in use and delegated to University of The Netherlands Antilles, based in Curacao.
Will we see a gradual phasing-out of .an, in favor of two new ccTLDs?

dotMobi to sell 5,000 premium .mobi domains

Afilias-owned dotMobi is taking another crack at selling off over 5,000 “premium” .mobi domain names that it has had reserved since its launch in 2006.
The reserved list, which includes domains such as television.mobi, recipes.mobi and shopping.mobi, has been published, and the domains have been turned on.
They all (or most) now resolve to dotMobi web pages where interested parties can file an expression of interest in the domain, in order to be alerted when they become available.
The actual process by which the domains will be allocated has yet to be announced.
The biggest premium .mobi sale I’m aware of to date was flowers.mobi, which Rick Schwartz picked up for $200,000 in 2006. He plans to sell the domain, probably at a loss, later this month.
The list makes fascinating reading. To my untrained eye, many of the domains appear to be utterly bizarre inclusions.
Businesswoman? Out-of-town meeting? Need to quickly self-administer a Pap smear? Why not visit speculum.mobi for a list of nearby gynecological equipment suppliers?
The full list can be downloaded from here. The official dotMobi announcement is here.

NeuStar wins UrbanBrain .brand contract

NeuStar has become the preferred provider of registry services to UrbanBrain, a consultancy that hopes to launch “.brand” top-level domains with major Japanese companies.
The companies said in a press release:

Under the alliance, Neustar and UrbanBrain will provide brand owners with the expertise and support required to prepare and submit their applications to ICANN, and will provide all of the registry services necessary for brands to launch and operate their own Internet extensions.

NeuStar already operates the .biz and .us registries under contract with ICANN and the US government respectively, as well as providing back-end services for a number of other TLDs.
UrbanBrain is currently associated with a proposed bid for .site.
The only formally announced commercial .brand to date is .canon. Canon is working with GMO Registry, another Japanese firm.

Telnic wants to sell numeric domain names

Telnic, the .tel registry, wants ICANN to allow it to start taking registrations of purely numeric domain names.
While the company has not submitted a formal request, Telnic CEO Khashayar Mahdavi has asked for numbers-only domains in a separate public comment period.
VeriSign has asked ICANN for the ability to start accepting hyphens and numbers in domain names in the .name TLD, including purely numeric strings such as phone numbers.
Mahdavi, who apparently views .name as a key competitor, wrote in a comment submitted on the VeriSign request:

If ICANN decides to remove this restriction from .name then this change in policy should apply to .tel as well. Approving the release of this restriction on one TLD and leaving it in place for another provides the first with a substantial commercial advantage.
In order to avoid such an unjust result, we respectfully request that, if ICANN decides to approve VeriSign’s request to allow all-numeric strings (and strings with combinations of numbers and hyphens) to be registered as domain names in .name, it simultaneously allow Telnic to do the same in .tel.

Telnic’s charter, part of its ICANN registry contract, currently states “The .tel registry will not allow numeric-only domains to be registered at the registry level.”
I believe the restriction was conceived in order to avoid clashes with the international telephone numbering authorities and the ENUM protocol. Mahdavi wrote:

Telnic believes it is important to avoid conflict with ENUM , so it will continue to forbid the registration of single digit domain names in .tel. Such domain names would be necessary for creating an ENUM tree under .tel, so forbidding them makes a .tel-based ENUM system impossible.

When Telnic originally applied for .tel in 2000, one of the reasons it was rejected was the fact that the International Telecommunications Union wasn’t happy with the idea of phone numbers in domain names.

Now .mobi wants to auction ultra-short domains

Afilias-owned dotMobi has applied to ICANN to auction off one and two-letter .mobi domain names, following in the footsteps on other top-level domain registries.
The company had a plan to selectively allocate some such domains based on a Request For Proposals approved by ICANN almost two years ago, now it wants to be able to auction off whatever domains remain.
dotMobi said (pdf):

Once the previously approved RFP round has concluded, dotMobi will conduct an auction of any remaining domains according to a schedule determined by dotMobi. For any domains not allocated during either the RFP or auction rounds, dotMobi will announce a release date and will invite open, first-come-first-served registrations.

Requests to allocate one and two-character domains have previously been submitted and approved by Neustar (.biz), Afilias (.info), puntCAT (.cat), Tralliance (.travel) and RegistryPro (.pro).
Telnic (.tel) has a similar proposal still under board review.
Such auctions offer a one-time windfall for the registry operator. NeuStar’s .biz auction raised a reported $360,000 last year.
As DomainNameWire reported yesterday VeriSign has withdrawn its application for one-letter auctions in .net. Its proposal would have seen expired one-character domains returned to registry control, allowing them to be re-auctioned.

Price increase on the cards for .biz

NeuStar is to raise its registry fee on .biz domain names by $0.45, to $7.30 year, according to a letter sent to ICANN by the company’s vice president of registry services.
The changes will come into effect April 1, 2011, following the mandatory notice period registries have to give their registrar partners.
NeuStar has just seen a monthly decrease in total .biz registrations, from 2,070,343 to 2,065,389 at the start of the month, according to HosterStats.com.

New TLD competition group throws in the towel

The ICANN working group tasked with deciding whether registrars should be allowed to apply for new top-level domains has failed to reach agreement after over six months of talks.
This means it will be down to the ICANN board of directors to decide, possibly at its next meeting, what the rules should be on vertical integration and cross ownership in new TLDs.
It’s been pretty clear from the Vertical Integration Working Group’s recent discussions that there would be no chance of the group reaching a consensus on the headline topics in the remaining time allotted to it.
Within the last two hours, the GNSO Council has been notified that the group has failed to reach consensus.
Should ICANN-accredited registrars be allowed to apply for new TLDs? Should registries be allow to sell direct to consumers? Should registrars be able to own stakes in registries? Vice versa? How much? Whither the .brand?
All these questions will now have to be resolved by the ICANN staff and board.
Currently, the Draft Applicant Guidebook limits registry/registrar cross-ownership to 2%, effectively barring existing registrars from applying to run new TLD registries.
While the VI working group has been working on the problem since February, positions quickly became entrenched based on the commercial interests of many participants. There has been no substantial progress towards compromise or consensus in months.
But the group did manage to reach rough agreement on a number of peripheral problems that will have a lesser economic impact on the incumbent registries and registrars.
For example, the board will likely be told that “single registrant, single user” TLDs, a variant of the .brand where the registry is the only registrant, should be looked into further.
On the core issue of cross ownership, three proposals are on the table.
One, the Free Trade Proposal, would eliminate such restrictions entirely. Two others, RACK+ and JN2+, would increase the limits to 15%.
The RACK+ proposal is the closest to the status quo in terms of barring vertical integration, while JN2+ contains explicit exceptions for .brand TLDs and smaller community registries.
Given the lack of consensus, it’s quite feasible that the ICANN board may decide to cherry pick from two or more proposals, or come up with something entirely novel. We’ll have to wait and see.

New TLDs get their own conference

Former ICANN staffer Kieren McCarthy is organizing a conference dedicated to new top-level domains, set to run in San Francisco for two days next February.
The .nxt conference will be hosted by the Internet Society’s SF Bay Area chapter. Pricing is expected to be in the $300 to $500 range.
The organizers are currently looking for speakers, exhibitors and attendees from registries, registrars, potential TLD applicants, consultants and marketers.
McCarthy told me that the idea is to focus more on the business opportunity side of things, rather than the policy-making that dominates ICANN meetings.
“Once all the argument is over and the rules are set, I thought it would be great to have a conference focused on what we were all going to do with the Internet,” he said in an email.
The agenda is expected to be split into four tracks: policy, implementation, models and marketing, tackling subjects such as how to run a registry and how to effectively market a TLD.

Saudi IDN landrush begins

SaudiNIC has kicked off the landrush phase for its recently approved Arabic-script country-code top-level domain, السعودية.
The registry is using the term “landrush” to describe what other registries would call general availability. As of yesterday, it’s first-come-first-served.
Registrants must be Saudi citizens or owners of Saudi trademarks, and the registration process requires the necessary documents to be filed. It’s Arabic-script only.
There won’t be much of an aftermarket; flipping domains is frowned upon and each registrant has to show a “reasonable relationship” to the domain they want to register.
UPDATE: I’ve been told that the launch may have been delayed, which I am attempting to confirm. The registry web site is still announcing yesterday as the launch date.